The road to a creating a successful business is never easy. However, if you have a list of all the things you shouldn’t do, you can turn that into a recipe for success.

Here are 10 startup mistakes that needs to be avoided to survive past the initial roadblocks.

You can change everything about a house but its location. Likewise, if your startup is in a bad location, you can’t change the nature of that location. It’s easier to move the startup.

By choosing an obscure niche a startup may paint themselves in a corner. If you are afraid of competition, this is not the way to avoid it.

There are only so many Twitters for pet owners one can come up with. The bottom line is that the Google of tomorrow will not be like Google.

Obstinacy -– or inability to adapt kills startups who would have survived had they not been too stubborn to see what their users were telling them.

Knowing a good programmer from a bad one often takes being a good one yourself, or having a trusted one on your team. Exceptional programmers are always in short supply. So the odds are stacked up against hiring good ones.

How fast you can scale will determine whether your startup lives or dies once you get traction. On the wrong platform scalability will be the bottleneck. And users often don’t wait for you to figure it out.

Somewhere someone will for sure be interested in your product, you just don’t know who yet? Sounds like those people may not exist. Be sure to check.

You get what you spend on. With too little money you may not be able to flesh out your product in to its full potential. At the same time, spending too much before you grow big enough to have the numbers to raise the next round too can be disastrous. As this may mean that are out of cash, which often spells the end.

Raising too much will likely make you feel like a huge success even before you made anything useful. At the end of the day it’s users, not investors, you want to impress the most.

If the choice is between making investors happy or making your users happy, always choose users. If the user is happy, your investors will make money eventually. Never sacrificing user interests to (supposed) profit.

As you can always make money later. This, however, cannot be said about making users happy. You need to make something they want now.